Friday, October 19, 2012

Augustus Alzona presages 2012 Maryland election results for the GOP in a Gazette Newspapers story, by C. Benjamin Ford, quoted below:
...
In Montgomery County, nonaffiliated voters passed registered
Republicans for the first time in December 2010. In the latest report,
there were 333,118 Democrats, 123,404 Republicans and 133,523
nonaffiliated voters.

Augustus Alzona, who served on the
Montgomery County Republican Central Committee from 1998 to 2002 and
again from 2006 to 2010, said he was not surprised.

From his
observations, voter registration outreach efforts by the Montgomery
County GOP initially helped attract new voters, including minorities in
the increasingly diverse county, Alzona said.

But then, money raised was sent to help the top of the campaign tickets and less was spent on localretail political efforts, he said.

That was a major reason why the number of nonaffiliated voters eventually passed the number of registered Republicans, he said.

Republican
numbers have continued to decline in Montgomery County, while the
number of Democrats and nonaffiliated voters grows, he said.

Alzona,
who remains a Republican, expressed frustration that as a socially
conservative Catholic, he believes too many Republicans are supporting
same-sex marriage. This could lead other social conservatives to leave
the party and either become independents or find another party to join,
he said.

“One of my pet peeves was the focus was solely on
fundraising and not on the grass-roots fundamentals of registering
voters,” Alzona said.
...